Tackling the three R’s in a second or third language

Stolen shopping carts collect behind Indian Creek Apartment Homes. In good weather, Nyo Nyo spends hours pushing her 2-year-old around the parking lot in one, her skirt flapping, his head high, like a prince surveying his realm. His mother is less at home in the country that took her family in four years ago, when they arrived in the Atlanta suburbs from Burma Myanmar by way of a Thai refugee camp.

“The problem, she says, is language. “No English,” she apologizes, and calls to the oldest of her three kids, on the playground outside their apartment.

Reluctantly, daughter Thayoomoo Ywin untangles herself from a swing and comes running. Thayoomoo is 8 going on 30. After 2-1/2 years at the International Community School ICS in nearby Decatur, Ga., her English is close to fluent, she’s on track doing math at a second-grade level, she’s in the top half of her class in reading, and she is her parents’ lifeline to the English-speaking world.

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